Green Energy

The cooler weather seems to have reduced the bug pressure on the different things growing in the garden.  Although it is dry, things are growing nicely.  Several days ago, we made some homemade Ranch Salad dressing.  It is a perfect time to enjoy a fresh, healthy, green salad.  Seems like that would give you green energy, doesn't it?

Let's put together the salad.  First, there are baby basil plants sprouting up all over the garden from the seeds dropped by the mature basil plants.  A few of these tender basil leaves ought to add some flavor to our salad.


Baby basil seedling

On the same row, the kale is really coming on strong.  Let's pull some of the smaller leaves for our salad.  Kale is one of the most healthy plants there is.  We've really grown to like it. 

Fresh Kale

Next row contains Oak Leaf Lettuce.  After eating a bunch of this right off the plant, I added a good bunch of this to our basket. 


Oak Leaf Lettuce

We'll pull a few radishes and slice them up for a peppery flavorful punch to our salad.   

Radishes

On the next row is a lettuce mix called Mesclun Mix.  This mix of young salad leaves originated in Provence, France.  It contains chervil, arugula, endive, leaf lettuce, Swiss Chard, mustard greens, dandelion, frisee, lamb's lettuce, radicchio and sorrel.  We've found that this is good when the leaves are young.  If you let them get too large, the smell is pungent and the taste is very hot and peppery and overpowers your salad. 


Mesclun Mix

The next row contains some Black Seeded Simpson lettuce.  This is an all around good, productive lettuce that we enjoy all winter long.  It is good to eat and good to use its big leafy leaves for garnishing platters of food at Thanksgiving.


Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

And finally, we'll snip off some nice leaves from this pretty lettuce which is one of the lettuces in the row of Rocky Top Lettuce Mix.  All you need to do is snip off the leaves you want with a pair of scissors to allow the plant to continue producing delicious leaves for your salad bowl.
 

Rocky Top Lettuce

And after washing up all the leaves and putting it in the salad spinner to dry, here is our salad bowl with sliced radishes.  If you listen closely, you can almost hear it calling for some salad dressing. 


Salad Bowl

I pulled out the homemade Ranch salad dressing we made a couple of days ago and drizzled some of that goodness over the top of it, added some pickled banana peppers and then ground some black pepper and sea salt over it.  Let's grab a fork and say Grace and I'll tell you how the fresh salad was.  

Mmmmm...  Mmmmm!

I'll let the picture below explain what we thought about the salad.

'Nuff said!